Saturday, July 10, 2010

Around 3am on July 2nd, a bomb exploded just outside a Canadian Army Recruitment Center in Trois Rivieres, a small city roughly half-way between Montreal and Quebec City. The building was empty at the time, and nobody was hurt. While one man was arrested at the scene of the attack, police claim that he was not involved but is simply being charged with obstruction (wtf?).

The bomb attack was claimed by Résistance internationaliste ("Internationalist Resistance"). Several years ago, other low-level attacks in the province of Quebec were also claimed by this group, operating under the name "Initiative de résistance internationaliste". (See "Radical Anti-Imperialists Carry Out Second Armed Attack in Quebec" from back in 2006 on this blog.)

As of yesterday, it has been publicly acknowledged that the Integrated National Security Enforcement Team - formerly the RCMP's NSIS, with a counterinsurgency mandate - is on the job, but as of yet no arrests have been made. (And hopefully, none will be!)

What follows is and english translation of the IRI's communique (translated by yours truly)

July 2nd 2010
Last night an unimprovised explosive device was detonated at the Canadian Army Recruitment Center in Trois-Rivières (2 calls were made for it to be evacuated). Résistance internationaliste* is emerging from the shadows once again, to join with the historic popular opposition to the military practices and ideals of the Canadian State, to makes sure that the political, economic and military powers cannot carry out their indoctrination justifying their imperialist adventures with impunity.

The Canadian government is not satisfied submitting us to the mercantile oligarchy and handing over our resources, it demands that we go and enslave other peoples. It is not enough that we are subjected to the effects and dangers of natural gas exportation, we have to go and secure its pipeline (TAPI) on Afghan soil.

It is not enough that we are the docile hostages of oil and gas devastation, we have to join the Canadian navy to protect their looting in the Niger Delta. It is not enough that we serve as profitable guinea pigs for the pharmaceutical industry’s schemes, we have to go and protect the global opium supply provided the Karzai narco-government.

Because it opposes the jingoism being drummed up by Washington, the population is targeted by non-stop miserable propaganda framing the foreign occupation of Afghanistan as a civilizing mission. The apostles of “democratic values” and the “saviours” of Afghan women are soldiers in an army that contracts out torture and which covers up sexual crimes throughout its hierarchy, ostensibly in order to keep the sexual aggressors active abroad (bill S-3). “Our soldiers” are the same ones who, just yesterday, crushed the Métis people, who have suppressed workers’ mobilizations time and time again, who machine-gunned the Québecois opposition against conscription, who imposed the War Measures Act, who besieged an Amerindian community for the sake of a golf course, who overthrew the democratically elected Haitian government, and who, tomorrow, will impose on us the dictates of the market and fiscal submission.

The directors of the banks and the multinationals can pocket fortunes in their tax shelters, but we are the ones who are made to finance imperialist expansion. Five-billion-dollar tanks, eight-billion-dollar planes, fifty-billion-dollar warships and soldiers for five hundred thousand dollars a year, this means a majority of workers denied unemployment insurance, one in four households who have difficulty keeping a roof over their head, old-age with a miserable pension, a ton of children who are still not properly fed.

This operation against the recruiting center is our resistance against the army’s brainwashing, against the intensive solicitation of a younger generation that is facing the void of a demeaning society. We cannot surrender the monopoly of violence or the stage to the State (an orgy of repression at the G-20, supplying “explosives” to manipulated young people in Toronto, “fundamentalist” threats of officer Gilles Breault).
As for the soldiers in the Canadian Army, just to be clear, they are in no way “ours”, they belong to the one to whom they pledge allegiance like idiots, Her Majesty Elizabeth II.

AGAINST IMPERIALIST WAR
RÉSISTANCE INTERNATIONALISTE (RI)

* Formerly IRI (Initiative de résistance internationaliste)

The above is a translation of a text on the La Presse website, which claims to be from the IRI. The French version of this text is also being included here: